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UH Wins NASA Grant to Study Mysterious Congo River Basin

The massive Congo River
Basin’s remote location and the political instability in the region have kept
researchers from gathering even the most basic information about it.

But Hyongki Lee, a University
of Houston civil engineering researcher, has come up with a new idea for
understanding this mysterious region _ studying it from space.

Lee won’t travel into
space, nor will he visit the Congo. He plans to use unanalyzed satellite images
to survey the basin’s approximate 2.3 million square miles.

The Congo is the world’s
second-largest river basin behind the Amazon, but researchers still don’t know
how much water exists in the wetlands, how much of the water comes from direct
precipitation, river flooding or upland runoff and how much of the basin is
wetlands.

Lee has received a $663,000
grant from NASA for the Congo project, which aims to answer those basic
questions as well as give researchers a better understanding of everything from
regional climate to greenhouse gas emissions.

“There is not much data (on
the basin) so modeling is very limited,” said Lee. “As a consequence, the other
important estimates based on the terrestrial dynamics of the Congo basin, such
as the methane emissions of its flooded wetlands and its contributions to
global methane levels, cannot be well known.”

Lee, who joined UH’s Cullen
College of Engineering last fall, will use data already collected from
satellites operated by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency.

These satellites have
gathered data through optical sensing of the region, radar topography and the
creation of gravity maps, which show areas of the Earth with significant mass
change due to terrestrial water storage change, such as in tropical
rainforests. Lee and his research team will combine and process the data to
answer questions about the Congo wetlands.

Combining multiple types of
data from different satellites is basically unheard of in hydrologic research,
Lee noted. If successful, his work will provide investigators with an entirely
new method for studying areas of the planet that are otherwise inaccessible.

“This is a new combination
of technologies for this application,” said Lee. “It’s a first attempt. That’s
one of the reasons we proposed it.”

About
the University of Houston

The University of Houston is
a Carnegie-designated Tier One public research university recognized by The
Princeton Review as one of the nation’s best colleges for undergraduate
education. UH serves the globally competitive Houston and Gulf Coast Region by
providing world-class faculty, experiential learning and strategic industry
partnerships. Located in the nation’s fourth-largest city, UH serves more than
39,500 students in the most ethnically and culturally diverse region in the
country.